Pablo pulled Charita off the sidewalk. She tripped on the curb, one of her sandals knocking loose, her brother letting go of her hair to grab her arm, and once they were halfway down Natoma, going around the corner for the main entrance to the lumberyard fence, Charita’s small dark face looked once back at Lester for a long hot-faced moment, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she’d see there when she looked.
Once again Lester had felt nauseated with shame. He went back inside the house, lay on his bed, and for hours imagined an entirely different scene, him taking Pablo’s hand, crushing it in his own, then punching Muñoz so hard in the face he’d be unconscious for days and wake up in mortal fear of Lester Burdon. Or he imagined himself sidestepping Pablo’s arm only to grab it, jerk it behind his back, and break it. And these pictures in his head were not new. He had them for every boy he ever had to fight at Chula Vista High. Maybe because he was tall and quiet and thin he called more attention to himself than the other anglos at school. But always it was the same—“Bur done maricón!Bur done maricón!”—and Lester would try to avoid the fight as long as possible. First he would deny to himself that that was where this name-calling was really going; he would try to smile off whatever insult was coming his way, and only when he felt the push of hands on his chest would he push back, hoping that would be enough, which it never was, and he would hold up fists he had no faith in only to be knocked to the ground, where he would stay curled up waiting for a teacher or someone to break it up or for the bully to lose interest and disappear. But they rarely did. Even when you arrested them, they showed up in your sleep, determined to unmask you, and show you to be the coward you really were.
Sometimes Lester would wake Carol and tell her his dream, but this was always a mistake, because it just gave her more ammunition in her nearly seasonal attempts to get him to quit the Sheriff’s Department, a job she had never quite accepted or understood him training himself for in the first place. Not only is it too dangerous, she would tell him, but “my God, you are so above those cowboy simpletons you work for. Any lamebrain with a GED can go to the academy and do what you’re doing!” She’d tell him he wasn’t living up to his potential, he should go back to school and get his master’s in education, and if there weren’t any teaching jobs in California, then she was quite willing to relocate for any job he might get.
But Carol was wrong, Lester would sometimes remind her, because he was already a teacher, a field training officer for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department, one of eight in the entire county, and of those eight, he was the youngest, with only six and a half years on patrol before they gave him the job. They were all assigned fresh recruits from the academy at Gavilan College, and for four weeks at a time—sometimes the six-to-six day shift, sometimes the overnight—he’d sit in the passenger side of his patrol car while his young trainee drove and he would deliberately and methodically begin to unload everything he knew about being a deputy sheriff. And what didhe know? He knew if you were taking things personally you were more dangerous. He knew that he had once put a wife abuser away illegally, and that more and more he found himself coming down harder on some arrestees than others. Not the petty criminals—the car thieves and purse snatchers, shoplifters or even drunk drivers—it was the bullies, the wife and child beaters, the suspected rapists, anyone who used his weight to crush another. He kept his record clean but he took pleasure in the arrests, in jerking a wife batterer’s arm far up behind his back while he lay facedown on the floor or sidewalk. He’d squeeze the cuffs on too tight, then pull him by the wrists to his feet. If he cried out, Lester would lean close to his ear and tell him to shut up. When he put him in the patrol car he wouldn’t bother to guide his head and he’d let him bump it on the way in. Sometimes they were big men, usually drunk, and Lester would fear them and squeeze the cuffs so tight they cried out. But other times he’d see a wife or child bruised or bleeding, sometimes burned or unconscious, and Lester’s stomach would fill with a galvanized, almost nauseating heat, a tremor in his hands and arms as he jerked the man to his feet, sometimes running him face first into a door casing on the way out, sometimes kneeling all his weight on the man’s neck as he tightened the cuffs even more.
But after these arrests, Lester’s rage and adrenaline would fade back and he’d feel spent and physically weak. Then the remorse would come, remorse that with each impassioned arrest he was doing his job less and less justice, and he’d vow not to get sucked in again, to instead perform his duties the way he was trained to. But these vows would fall away like cool ashes the next time he saw the bruised and broken evidence of one more man pushing his poison onto someone smaller and weaker and Lester’s heart would take over again. And then after the booking, when he was back out on patrol, drinking a soda behind the wheel, trying to fill the desert in his mouth, fear would begin to pool at the base of his stomach like a cold underground spring, fear that he was beginning to lose control and it was only a matter of time before one of these perps saw through his uniform and badge and gun, saw that Officer Burdon was an impostor, that he was one of those men who has never been in a fight and come out ahead, that all his swagger was really nothing that couldn’t be stepped on like a bug.
For a few months at a time, Lester was able to control his temper. He’d keep his eyes and ears off the wounded. He’d make the arrest and slip on the cuffs comfortably, escorting the man—and sometimes a woman—to his patrol car. He’d breathe deeply through his nose, ignore the onlookers, and open the back door. But sometimes the arrestee would struggle a bit getting in, or else yell something to a friend or family member standing nearby, or swear at Lester, and he would slam the door shut, pretending not to notice if his prisoner’s shoulder or leg wasn’t all the way in the car yet. Again, he was letting his emotion control the situation, even the Filipino boy out on the coast; he was young and scared and it would’ve been impossible for Lester not to feel fatherly toward him and do the right and patient thing. But what if the boy had been a grown man? Would Lester have drawn down on him? Shot him?
And at night, lying beside Carol, he’d dream of the parking lot and all of them waiting for him. One night his own wife and children were out there too, and even figures from his childhood, Pablo Muñoz, standing there holding Charita’s severed head in his hands like it was something of Lester’s he’d left behind.
By the third or fourth week of training, Lester would feel he knew the young man behind the wheel fairly well. They’d been spending nine to ten hours a day, five days a week, in a car together. Most of them were gym-hardened and in their early twenties, a slight shaving rash on the throat or upper cheek. And as he and his fully armed student drove through their assigned territory, either the wide green estates of Portola Valley or past the tenements and broken blacktop playgrounds of East Palo Alto, the bodegas, the barrooms with painted-over windows, the boarded-up drugstores, Lester passed on some basic tools and practices of the shift: the proper way to write clear traffic collision and crime reports, what to do when you discover a stolen vehicle, how you go about calling in a vehicle ID over the radio and get access to the computer through the dispatcher.